DENVER—After Peyton Manning joined the Denver Broncos in August, his task list was long—and would eventually include items that even his precise, thorough mind didn't conceive.

First, he had to overhaul the Broncos' offense. In the offseason and first months of the regular season, that meant extra on-field sessions working on route trees and blocking schemes and extra time in meetings. It meant pulling young players like rookie running back Ronnie Hillman aside during a special-teams practice period and working on nothing but fade routes while other skill-position players rested.

Eventually the attention to detail worked, and by Sunday Manning had his seventh three-touchdown performance in the last nine games. He paced the Broncos (9-3) to their seventh consecutive win, a 31-23 triumph over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (6-6) that clinched their second consecutive AFC West crown and first winning season in six years.

With the Broncos’ offense running as designed, it was time for Manning to work on the entire team. That meant taking time at team headquarters this week to counsel linebacker Wesley Woodyard on how to properly defend Bucs tight end Dallas Clark, a longtime target and teammate of Manning's with the Indianapolis Colts.

Manning's work beyond the obvious also meant teaching a defensive tackle how to run pass routes. No detail is too small for Manning, not even taking an undrafted third-year lineman like Mitch Unrein and turning him from occasional goal-line blocker into effective short-yardage passing threat.

Never mind that Unrein hadn't caught a touchdown pass since his freshman year of high school in Eaton, Colo., or that the notion of throwing to a 6-4, 291-pound defender appeared so gimmicky that it didn't seem to fit inside Manning's regimented offense.

"He gave me some pointers in the walkthrough and practice for the past three weeks in how I'm supposed to take that angle on the safety on the edge, and my depth in the end zone. Stuff like that," Unrein said.

The lessons seemed superfluous until Unrein was sent into Sunday's game on the first possession for a first-and-goal play with simple instructions: run an out route from the backfield to the end zone. He executed it and caught the soft toss from Manning as though he'd been doing it his entire career. Unrein was giddy, and his fellow defensive players were ecstatic for him as he lived the lineman's dream. But Manning was focused on the long-term implications.

Now, no foe will look at the Broncos' jumbo goal-line package in quite the same way; they'll have to account for Unrein as a potential target—and, just as important, a target that Manning now trusts completely.

"Certainly when you put a big D-lineman in there, a lot of times the defense is thinking run," Manning said.

Not anymore. One defender that's forced to cover Unrein streaking into the left flat is one that's taken out of the box, or one that's not covering Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker or Joel Dreessen, the Broncos' primary passing threats in goal-to-go situations.

What the Broncos have learned this season is how to see beyond the obvious. As much as they repeat the mantra of taking their tasks one play at a time, Manning's presence means seeing three moves ahead while simultaneously computing every detail of the circumstance in front of them.

In the second quarter, that helped revive a drive that appeared stalled at the Denver 25-yard line. Manning caught the Bucs in a substitution, gathered the offense quickly and quickly handed off to Knowshon Moreno for no gain. No flag was thrown, but Manning went back to the sideline and lobbied his coaches to challenge the play, knowing that having 12 men on the field is one of the few infractions that instant replay can assess or overturn.

"Obviously, I have to take my eyes off for a second to see, but you know I can see guys running off the field," Manning said. "You know I ran over there to the side judge, and he kind of said, 'No, it wasn’t my call; it’s the back judge,' and I kind of ran over to him and I didn't get much feedback from him and then ran over to the sidelines."

The challenge worked, and Manning and the offense went to work again.

Such thorough, rapid dissemination is what one would expect from a supercomputer designed to defeat chess grandmasters—except what Manning offers now goes beyond that. In just eight months on the job, he's pulled an entire team to his intellectual level, creating a culture where no detail is unseen, no flaw is too meaningless to correct, and no hour is too early for a meeting—as evidenced by the cornerbacks' predawn cram sessions before team meetings throughout the week.

"We see him doing stuff and we just do it because of what he does," said Thomas, who has emerged as Manning's top target and caught two touchdown passes Sunday. "I think it's just us doing it because we want to be like him.

"If you follow somebody like Peyton, you can be good in the league."

More important, you can be a successful team—something the Broncos haven't been in years but clearly are now, down to every last detail and nuance that Manning identifies and exploits.